Champions League final: Barcelona's sunshine boy Gerard Piqué ready to face former club Manchester United

Barcelona’s best players seem as invisible off the field as they are dazzling
on it. So Xavi can toddle off into the countryside to pick his mushrooms,
Lionel Messi may enjoy a behind-closed-doors love affair with his
PlayStation and Andrés Iniesta becomes so anonymous that he recently got
mistaken for a waiter in a local restaurant.

Connections: Gerard Piqué spent four years learning his trade at Manchester UnitedPhoto: AFP

Ah, but at least Gerard Piqué is doing his bit to make up for his mates’ disappearing act beyond the Nou Camp and living the footballer’s stereotypical superstar dream.

Last week, it was a peekaboo snog with Shakira on a luxury yacht on Lake Como, not long after the pop goddess had posted a photo of her new toyboy on her Twitter account thus: “I present to you my sunshine”.

Yes, Barcelona’s sunshine boy 'Geri’ is different, the charismatic one who makes the Catalan paparazzi’s day, the joker who makes his team-mates both laugh and wince with his high jinks, the born and raised soci, or club member, who makes the fans’ swoon by coming out with pearls like “Barcelona is in my DNA” and “this is the team of my life”.

Most important of all, he is also the one who radiates such swaggering assuredness on the field that Franz Beckenbauer, no less, sees a touch of his young self in 'Piquénbauer’, rating him possibly the best defender in the world.

The question gnawed away again as the sunshine boy reintroduced himself at Barça’s Champions League final open day at the Nou Camp this week to remind English football what it has been missing. For Piqué’s qualities of leadership, spirit and intelligence are reflected in his charismatic persona.

As he recounted the tale of how, after four years learning his trade at Manchester United, he told Ferguson he wanted to go back to Barcelona, it is easy to imagine how daunting a meeting that must have been for a 21 year-old far from home. But even back then, Piqué’s supreme confidence served to steel him.

“I still remember the day,” he said.

“I went into his [Ferguson’s] office and just told him straight away. I told him I appreciated him a lot, had had four great years in Manchester, felt at home and enjoyed playing a lot, but that I wanted to go home, that Barcelona is my home and I was a fan of the club since I was a child.

"He understood completely and our relationship is still good.

“I don’t know if he regrets letting me leave. At the time I left, it was a good decision for him, for me, for Manchester and Barcelona. But when I arrived here in Barcelona I was lucky to have a lot of minutes to show that I could play.” And how.

Within 12 months, the returning prodigal had been elevated from fifth-choice centre-back to a regular starting spot and in his 2009 “dream final” against his old mates in Rome, he had a tremendous game.

Before the match, he had mused that Wayne Rooney might “make me look stupid”. Instead, Piqué made a critical intervention to stop him from scoring.

Doubtless, he reminded Rooney, a striker he still thinks of as the “strongest, most powerful” in the game, when they met the other day.

“We always had a great relationship,” Piqué said, reminiscing with a laugh about the time Ferguson forced them both to change their garish primrose boots in a training session “because the Boss, he didn’t like yellow, no?”.

He didn’t still call Ferguson 'Boss’, surely? “Oh, Sir Alex is always the Boss and always will be,” Piqué said. “His career has been absolutely incredible.”

Besides his fabulous talent as a centre-back who is as adept at launching goalscoring moves as stopping the opposition’s, Piqué’s effervescent, fun-loving personality has evidently been just as important in enlivening the Barca dressing room.

He was always adamant that the mickey-taking and banter he experienced at United was something refreshing to take back to Spanish football because “the team which laughs and jokes together will show a fighting attitude on the pitch”.

So it is that he can drive his teammates nuts, as the bloke who decides to start pillow fights on a Champions League flight home, who persuades air stewardesses to play a punk anthem at full blast over the public address to wake the entire plane, or who sweet-talks weary customs officials in Donetsk to open the duty free shop at 2am just so he can buy some pralines for his mates.

Occasionally, he goes over the top, as when he celebrated Barça’s 2009 title win by when he grabbing hold of the mike and leading a rousing 90,000-strong rendition of a favourite Nou Camp chorus: “Jump, jump, jump! Only Madrid fans aren’t jumping!”

Even Xavi gave him a ticking off for disrespect afterwards.

But, naturally, such Madrid-baiting — he also denies he nearly caused a punch-up in the tunnel after the recent La Liga Clasico in the Bernabéu by taunting his opponents with a cry of “Eight points, eight points! We’ve won your Spanish title!” — has only heightened the love for him among the Barça supporters.

For, as this grandson of a former club vice-president says, he is living the Barcelona fans’ dream out there.

Only 24 and three league medals in the bag already, a World Cup and Champions League winner, a life of winding up the Madridistas, the prospect of being a Catalan matinee idol for years to come… what more could a man want?